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Modernism and Eugenics comprehensively explores modern Europe´s fixation with eugenic programmes of racial and national purification. It convincingly demonstrates that between 1870 and 1940 eugenicists were not only preoccupied with rescuing the individual from the anomie of modernity but equally championed a glorious racial destiny for the nation.

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Is the nation an ´imagined community´ centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? Modernism and Eugenics examines this question from a bifocal perspective. On the one hand, it looks at technologies through which the individual body was re-defined eugenically by a diverse range of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940; on the other, it illuminates how the national community was represented by eugenic discourses that strove to battle a perceived process of cultural decay and biological degeneration. In the wake of a renewed interest in the history of science and fascism, Modernism and Eugenics treats the history of eugenics not as distorted version of crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide but as an integral part of European modernity, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to renew an idealized national community. A refreshingly provocative reading of eugenic theories of biological improvement and of their complex relationship to modern biopolitics and political ideologies like nationalism and fascism

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Acknowledgements Introduction: Context and Methodology The Pathos of Science, 1870-1914 War: The World´s Only Hygiene, 1914-1918 Eugenic Technologies of National Improvement, 1918-1933 Eugenics and Biopolitics, 1933-1940 Conclusion: Towards an Epistemology of Eugenic Knowledge Selected Bibliography Index

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MARIUS TURDA is Deputy Director, Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Oxford Brookes University, UK, founder of the international Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics (Oxford Brookes), and the series editor of Studies in the History of Medicine with CEU Press in Budapest. He has published widely on the comparative history of eugenics and race.

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